He yelled at Alex that he was crazy, but nobody in the kitchen had the moral authority to name him crazy after what he had done to me.
Raúl attempted to step in, maybe from habit or mere instinct, still under the illusion that a few of them could manage this crisis the way they manage the casual humiliations of daily life.
Alex pushed him against the wall with astonishing ease, as if the other’s weight meant nothing to the force that night brought.
He told him not to dare touch him, and there was something so severe in his voice that even Raúl, used to intimidating, chose to back down.
Then Alex walked towards me, and instead of the fury he had just shown them, his face transformed into a careful, trembling urgency.
He knelt beside
me with such speed that he almost lost his balance, and called me with a different voice, the voice of when I was a pineapple.
He asked me to look at him, to stay awake, not to let me go, and I struggled to open my eyes a little more and find his face.
I managed to say his name barely like a thread, and I saw how his expression broke as he looked at the bruise spreading over my thigh.
He asked if I had hit him, but his tone was that of someone who needs confirmation, if not that of someone who already knows and just wants to hear me breathe.
I nodded barely, almost imperceptibly, and then silence returned to the kitchen with that dense quality that precedes definitive decisions.
Alex took a very slow breath, as if he needed to hold something inside himself before doing
the following, and then he took the phone out of his pocket.
He immediately dialed 911 and spoke with fierce clarity, reporting that there was a pregnant victim, domestic violence, and an urgent need for an ambulance and police.
Heleпa shouted from behind that that was a family matter, as if the word family could still serve as a refuge after such brutality.
